Today’s Menu

Do not eat the kind of food that “injures a man, deteriorates his spirit,
and renders his body prone to disease,” but “eat that [you] may
live.” So, sounding very modern, said Clement of Alexandria in the early
third century.

Twenty-first-century Americans have, unfortunately, learned all too well
the dangers of ignoring such insights. But what if the remedies promoted in
our culture—the food pyramid, recommended daily allowances, low-fat diets,
and all the rest—are misshapen? What if the modern science of food has
made us worse eaters rather than better ones, and the industrialization of
our food chain has driven the very sort of “emasculation of plain food”—“straining
off the nourishing part” of it—of which Clement accuses the gluttons?

Michael Pollan, the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California
at Berkeley, thinks the answer to these questions is yes, as he writes in his
newest book, In Defense of Food. Pollan has written previously on
a range of environmental and cultural topics, and here he takes up the question
of how to eat. But the villains of his account are not the usual suspects that
our health teachers and diet books taught us to fear, but the modernization
of the Western diet and the ideology that he calls “nutritionism”:
the belief that we can understand foods, and their effects on us, simply in
terms of their component parts.

Reduced Foods

The book begins with the story of how an unwitting alliance between overeager
scientists, excitable journalists, and wellness-minded government officials
changed the way we think about food.

By breaking down foods into their constituents, scientists claimed to be
able to understand what makes us healthy in the distinctively reductionistic
terms that are now so natural to us: It is not, for example, the meat that
makes you healthy, but the protein it contains, while the fat in
it is actually unhealthy, and so on. Journalists reported on these
studies with predictable gusto, and the government got into the act by telling
us how to eat—that is to say, by telling us which nutrients to
take in, and which other substances to avoid.

And so the cult of nutritionism was born. This new mindset created, as might
have been expected, a huge range of opportunities for businessmen: Simply engineer
things to a certain set of nutritional standards, receive a seal of approval
(“Low fat!” “No cholesterol!” “Heart-healthy!”),
and Voila!: health food. Hence the explosion of heavily processed,
prepackaged goods in the center aisles of our supermarkets, and the quiet retreat
of the boring, scientifically uninteresting, (relatively) fresh stuff to the
bins around the edges.

But while the ecological and cultural effects of all of this were bad enough,
the damage didn’t stop there—the science was bunk, too. Everything
we now know about food clearly suggests that “nutrients” are rarely
effective on their own; it is only within a huge range of delicately balanced,
dynamic interactions that the food we eat, and the activity of eating it, manages
to sustain us. Disrupt this equilibrium, and you end up where we are now: in
possession of more facts than ever, but far less healthy than we ought to be.

Fine Dining

Pollan encapsulates his moral in three simple directives: “Eat
food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” We must not react to the failings
of nutritionism by appealing simply to more science. It is instead in the
direction of tradition, of an understanding of food rooted in the common
wisdom of thousands of years of human culture, that we ought to orient ourselves.

By speaking of “food,” for example, Pollan means to exclude the
vast majority of the “edible goods” that crowd our supermarket
shelves—we are to regard as food only the things that our grandmothers
or great-grandmothers would have recognized as such. Similarly, “plants” means
fresh ones, unprocessed and grown locally in nutrient-rich, pesticide-free
soil.

These may seem to be radical suggestions, but they’re also increasingly
workable ones, thanks to the greater availability of organic and locally produced
foods in supermarkets, the growing number of farmers’ markets, and the
fast spread of Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, in which individuals
buy a sort of “subscription” to a farm in exchange for regular
boxes of seasonal produce. And Pollan argues convincingly that the likely costs
of maintaining the status quo make wholesale changes the only viable
option.

In Defense of Food is not, however, a book just about bodily health
or the ecological consequences of the ways we eat. Pollan is also concerned
with the most fundamental aspects of what it is to be a human person, to live
in families and communities, to be a part of a culture and an economy.

And so while he gives no signs of any religious persuasion—he cannot,
for example, recognize any other “point” in praying a blessing
before meals beyond encouraging more deliberate eating—the message of
the book is ultimately a Christian one. At the end, for example, he describes
food’s capacity to reveal itself “for what it is”:

no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living
beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on the other,
and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.

That this cycle of interdependence might have its ultimate source beyond
mere soil and sunlight is an observation waiting to be added. But we cannot
pay it anything more than lip service so long as our meals are nothing but
mere feedings. Pollan, like Clement, reminds us that the health of body and
earth are at once a condition of, and themselves conditioned by, that of the
human soul.

The quote from Clement is taken from his Paedagogus. Michael
Pollan’s website can be found at http:michaelpollan.com. For searchable
directories of CSA programs, farmers’ markets, family farms, and other
sources of organic and sustainably grown food across most of the United States,
the reviewer recommends http://localharvest.org.

“Today's Menu” first appeared in the September 2008 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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